Fleur and Max immediately scrambled to their giant feet from where they lay in the corner and ambled forward in anticipation of play outside. Richard followed the trio to the door to make sure Thorne and Thomas were nearby to oversee the child’s safety. Richard stifled a chuckle. The two men were trying to put forth a team effort to keep up the chopping of wood, but it appeared to be slow going, with the pile of fuel hardly moving past the level of the day before when Richard had taken out his own frustrations on the chopping block.
After about an hour of the sooty rebuilding of the fireplace masonry, the chatter outside the cottage changed. A new voice entered the conversation, a familiar feminine voice. Saints preserve Ireland. Would he never again be able to encounter that woman without looking like a sweating, filthy, common laborer?
He had time only to grab for his shirt before she was framed in the open cottage door. Her face was in shadow, but he couldn’t miss seeing her fold her arms in front of her breasts. His breath caught in his throat and for a moment, he could think of nothing to say. He should ask how her trip to Bocollyn House fared. He should ask about the health of Sidmouth’s duchess. In the end, she spoke first.
“Captain Thorne has taken my tribe of miscreants on a long walk again. Why are you standing there gawping at me? Come over here and pretend you’ve missed me.” When she opened her arms, he walked straight into perdition.
Once his arms enclosed warm woman, he felt like an awkward school boy again. He didn’t know where to start, so she helped him remember. She leaned her head against his neck with a sigh and guided his hand to one of her breasts.
10
Along time later, Richard pushed away and gave Harriet a severe gaze. “What happened the last time? That can never happen again. I cannot sail away from you not knowing whether or not I’ve left a babe in your belly.”
She turned sharply away from him and stalked to the window.
He followed and curled his arms around her from behind. “Since I can’t seem to make you see what a bad choice I am as a lover, I have to make sure you’re safe. I could not bear to think of you in pain, or have Nicholas think less of us, or God forbid, give your brother-in-law a reason to take your son away again.”
When she spun around to face him, her green eyes clouded in anger. She poked a thumb toward her chest. “I decide whom I will love and how. No one has the right to make that decision for me, not even my well-meaning cousin.”
“Oh, so you are the only one who can make decisions about how and when to love?” He took both of her hands and carefully kissed the tips of her fingers. “I’ll not spend my seed inside you again, unless…”
“Unless what?” The flash in the look she leveled toward him would shatter a lesser man. But, dammit, he was a marine. He would decide what chances he would take with this woman, and so dropped to his knees on the stone floor at her feet.
“Unless…you agree to post the banns for our marriage, beginning this Sunday, in the Bocollyn church. I promised Captain Bellingham I would be back aboard theBlack Condorwithin a fortnight. I’ll send word that I’ll return the Monday after the third Sunday.
“If you’ll have me for your lawful husband? I’ve not much to offer, except my service in the King’s Navy. But I will be true to no other than you until both of us are dead in the ground, and I will protect you and your son with my very life.”
“And I’m to agree to marry another man to send off to war to die?”
Richard had barely opened his mouth in reply when she spun away and then whirled back to his side. “Sidmouth put you up to this. Didn’t he? The two of you decided my fate over brandy and cigars last night.”
“No…that is, not exactly.”
“Stop, just stop, Richard.” She moved close and placed her fingers across his mouth. “You are a terrible liar. But I want you any way I can have you, and we have just wasted a good quarter hour of the time Captain Thorne has given us while he leads that circus of boy, footman, dogs, and that silly donkey Bert. I think the only reason he drags Bert along on their walks is so that we get a fair warning from his loud braying when they’re on the way back.” With that, she pulled his last clean shirt over his head and tossed it into a corner.
“I hope you have a strong will and constitution, Lieutenant, because I’m going to make you rue the day you made a stupid pact with my cousin.”
When she reached for him, he stepped back and held out his hand. “Just to be clear, we’re not going to do anything that will get you with child. Right?”
“Not if I can help it. With my luck, any child of ours would be another hard-headed boy to contend with, and I’ve had quite enough of stubborn men to last me a lifetime. Our last time together was an unfortunate lapse in judgment on my part. I had not been with a man in five years, and I apologize if I was a bit, um, overwhelmed in the moment. I promise to behave as a frigid gentlewoman from now on.”
“But what if…?”
“I should know by tomorrow if you’re doomed to matrimony, so there’s no need just yet to terrify our vicar with pronouncements of undying love between a dowager marchioness and a Royal Marine.”
Richard must have been holding his breath, because he let it out in a gust of relief. He had no idea if he’d won the argument with Lady Blandford, or whether he’d been manipulated by an expert.
By the time they finally sank to the well-worn rug in front of the cottage hearth with only a blanket over them, he didn’t care.
After a long timeof nothing but deep kisses, and plundering tongues, Harriet sat up with the blanket shrouding her shoulders, leaving her breasts free. Her nipples had not been this insistent for attention since Nicholas was a babe. “Why,” she demanded, “is the mere scent of you enough to drive me to distraction?”
Richard, impudent as ever, and no doubt confident in his power over women, rested his head on his hand, his elbow braced against the carpet. He made no attempt to cover the magnificence of his engorged cock. She found it maddening that the mere sound of her voice could set the thing to bobbing.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Perhaps you’re fond of chimney sweeps?”
“Oh…you’re an impossible man.” She swooped back down and straddled his hips beneath the blanket.
“Oh, no you don’t.” With one easy movement, he swept her beneath him as if she weighed nothing. And she knew better than that. Her height made her a formidable obstacle to move without her cooperation.
